Lit up roads

I stand out on the balcony and watch the cars, twenty-seven stories below me. Our number. It's hard to tell how fast they're going from way up here. They all look like little fireflies inching to get to their Evangelines. So many cars in the world and so many significant stories for each. Your car is our place, our little bubble. Our private sphere where we say hello along with a quick kiss on the lips, where we fill each other in on what we missed and the funny stories of the day.  Your car, that has brought us on beach trips and parties and dinners. Where our friends sit in the back and we all feel like a happy family, driving through fast food joints and dropping fries on the floor. Where you still hold my hand if I'm sad, and put your arm around me if I'm crying, even if it's a manual. Where we scream out the window on the highway because our mothers make our veins bloat and college doesn't seem to give us a break. Where we laugh until our stomachs hurt, and sing along to the songs on the radio in falsetto. Where conversations only end when the road does. Where we have our most bittersweet goodbyes because you know you'll have to go home alone at the end of the day, and only our little tradition makes it somewhat easier. We've shared more interesting places but I'd much rather be at the in between of where we were and where we have yet to go. Who knew we would spend thirty-three months driving around in that car?

Impaired Vision

A deep inhale, the smoke filling my browning lungs and my nerves plateauing into a steady numb. A slow, practiced exhale of a stream of city smog, my contribution to our already grey skies. The after taste of bitter medication, my daily fix of cigarettes to clear my mind and block out my anger. Sometimes one stick a day, sometimes twelve in an hour. It depends.

A nervous bite of the lip along with a churning of the gut. Little goosebumps along my arms and an irritating strand of hair tickling my chin like a misplaced feather. Yellowed teeth tap dancing in my mouth- freezing from the cold. Feet hanging off the edge, butt hard from the concrete, eyes gazing out into the horizon of pollution.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

For something that may never come. It's my every-evening routine to come out here onto this bridge and watch the traffic ease over the ledges, looking for answers in the never-ending trail of lights and echoes of blowing horns.

Be a Good Baby, Do What I Want.

Red nail polish, chipped into little squares on her dirty nails. It's kind of disgusting, really, but charming in a way. It's so .. her. Careless, fragmented, lived. She wraps her lips around the pipe and inhales into a choking cough, tears creep onto the edges of her lashes and she gasps for air. I take a long sip of wine, I'm almost done with the bottle. My words are slurred and emotions are heavy as I watch her hold onto the glass pipe like she's five and doesn't want to get lost in a crowd of strangers. Her hair falls over her face but she doesn't bother to move it, her eyes are glazed but she's still with me. I know her, and she isn't anywhere near where she wants to be.

She complains that she isn't hit enough, but still holds onto the pipe, "don't you have anything better?"

Her teeth are the shade of white only money can create. I wonder if her parents know she's here with me, or if she's even crossed their minds today. Her family's pretty fucked up. I never ask, but she sometimes slips a hint or two in our conversations, especially when it comes to her mom's anti-depressants. Oh well, they're rich, and money is a great distraction from a fucked up reality.

I like to think of myself as her escape, even though I know it's the drugs, really. At least she chooses to share her little heaven with me. She always comes to me when she wants something fun, she tells me that I'm the only one who understands her, even though I don't even know her last name.

We walk over to the swimming pool, as we always do when the cocaine comes out to play. Our feet dipped into the sapphire water, I watch her lower her key into the powder and then into her nostrils, the obnoxious snort that follows and the clearing of her throat. I've never tried cocaine because it scares the shit out of me, but I always give it to her. I give her whatever she wants and never ask for anything in return, no matter how hard it is to get some of the things she wants.

I kind of like her more when she's drugged up compared to when she isn't. She still doesn't say much, but she looks at me with that knowing. I don't want to over-think, maybe it's nothing. But it gets to me every time. More than what she wears, more than how she fucking makes me feel, it's that stare she gives me that lingers. It's like no other love I've ever had before, no fights about what time we're supposed to meet up, what we're supposed to be saying, how we're supposed to fucking live. Basically, no bullshit. Hell, I don't even know. It's just some kind of easy-going bond we have. We don't want drama, we don't want complications, we just want to drink wine, sit in silence, and share a sapphire-blue pool.

Call your girlfriend

I wish I didn't have to do this, I wish I could rewind the clocks, go back to six months ago, before it all started, or maybe two years, before I even met Katie. Is that horrible? Am I horrible for wishing I could erase these two years with her? Or at least that I kept us as just friends? 


Please, anyone, ring the doorbell, knock on the door, call her cell phone and tell her it's an emergency. She continues fixing her makeup, talking about dinner plans for tomorrow night, oblivious to what I'm planning to tell her in a few minutes, once I get my script straight, once I actually know what to say as soon as she starts crying and hitting me. Do I let her, or do I grab her wrists? I don't know.


How did I get myself into this? Why did I let myself dive into a relationship I wasn't ready for, instead of wait for someone to come around like she did? Her, with shiny hair that always smells like coconut and exotic places I've never been, eyes that hold just enough mystery to make every meeting feel like the first, and that ... that something extra I can't place, her smile? The way she walks? I don't know. It's everywhere I look. In the spices in my kitchen, the neighbour's music that leaks between the cracks in the walls, even the flock of balloons the street clown hands out to children. "The conversation between your fingers and someone else’s skin, this is the most important discussion you can ever have," she said. Poetry in everything she says. Poetry when we talk into the night, lying side by side in her soft, ginger-scented sheets. Opening my eyes, telling that this is real, that she is the one, and that she understands that sometimes we are with the wrong people and it's hard because they wouldn't understand, but it is never our fault that fate has played us cruelly.


"It's time you tell her," she says, after six months, two weekend trips, eight slow dances, thirteen nights , twenty-four dinners, and possibly one thousand kisses in her doorway, in my car, in the dark. I know I should tell her, I look up to her brown eyes- They know me.

I continue to pretend that I'm reading, Katie doesn't notice that I haven't turned the page in the last ten minutes; she hasn't noticed much about me in a long time. I haven't noticed much about her, either. I wonder if she's seeing someone else, too. Katie, the sweet girl I met one day at the grocery, I should've known then that she'd be a safe choice among the potatoes and cartons of milk. Perhaps I did know, I was just hungry for someone to keep me warm at night and remind me that I'm handsome the way she did. Katie and her sweaters, her everyday-omelets, her scrunched-up-nose laugh. She really did make me happy, but now it's come down to a choice. I can't keep doing this to her, she doesn't deserve this.

"Tell her it's not her fault,"

"Tell her she'll understand one day,"

Katie deserves more than that, she deserves a good man who will never, ever cheat on her. She deserves someone who will gladly watch movies with her on a Friday night in pajamas every week of the rest of her life. She deserves someone who doesn't understand concerts, contemporary art and Pablo Neruda, so they can be happy in their art-less world together. She deserves someone who wants to visit the cats at the pet store with her, 'so they don't get lonely' she always says. Maybe I shouldn't tell her. She seems happy enough not knowing. We could just carry on until ... Until what? Until she gets frustrated that I haven't proposed? Until she finds out, until someone tells her? No. Katie deserves this.

She's brushing her hair and humming one of her songs. Oh, Katie, I love you. The way someone loves the sweater that always works for a day they have nothing to wear. I love that you know what drink I want whenever you go to Starbucks, I love that you kiss my forehead in the morning to wake me up, I love that you ask the waitress for Tabasco for me because you know I eat it with every meal.

I sit on the bed beside her dressing table; she looks at me and rolls her eyes, "You really need to shave. You look like a pedophile. And what is wrong with your shirt? What is that stain? Ew, that's disgusting, can you please clean up without me having to tell you? And can you comb your hair? God, you know, sometimes I really wonder how I let you out of the house looking like that," she says. Oh, right. This is Katie. I ignore her comments and try to retain the good memories I just had.

She is oblivious to my deep breath, to my knotted fingers. "K, I can't do this anymore." It escapes my lips in a foggy whisper and she sits, frozen. I only call her K when something terrible has happened. She lowers the hairbrush and looks at me.

"Why?"

Oh god, here it is. The question. What do I do? Do I say it isn't working out and hide that I've been cheating on her for the past six months? Do I tell her? What would she want to know?

"I've met someone else,"

Katie stares at herself in the mirror. She's silent for so long, it scares me. What now?

I want to take my time to be free.

To venture into a dark forest, dense with life- embracing adventure and the unknown. Hands bloodied from thorns, dirtied from mud, and shaking with fear, when will I ever be this alive? Let's build a fire, attempt to make furious orange glowing heat out of dead sticks on damp earth. Lets climb the mountains, 90 degrees shooting into the sky, and witness the virginal stars, untouched and untainted by curtains of clouds.  Lets swim in the ocean, blue-green broken glass glistening under the sun, searing our eyes with every eruption at the surface. Or perhaps we could just lay here, sheltered by the thick overgrowth of green giants older than our ancestors, and contemplate how funny it was that we believed life existed before this.

What were we doing? What did we know? The years we spent in schools and work, and all we learned is how to look out windows and dream about life as it passed us by, running its course in supermarkets, in movie theatres, in department stores. All these slaves to consumerism, I laugh at them. And no, not a giggle, a deep rumbling volcanic laughter that shifts continents and shakes the glass ornament planets on their chandelier. Let them spend their "hard-earned" money on clothes that will never make them happy, on shiny gadgets they will throw away in a few years, all these things corrupting and polluting our water sources, our skies.

Who condemned us to desks, threw collars onto our necks and sold us as slaves of the economy? He may have succeeded in conditioning the human mind to believe work equals survival, but he has surely failed to take away the human thirst for adventure.